the amount of marches and number of participants has grown exponentially

WRITTEN BY ENRICO DE ANGELIS, translated by Mary Rizzo
After almost a year, let’s take a look at the fundamental moments of the revolt in Syrian, running the gamut of repression, the regime’s propaganda and “hope”. From the first protests in Damascus up to the bloody episodes of recent days.

A Syrian dissident once told me that ever since the revolts in Syria started, time passes faster than in the rest of the world. If outside, a day goes by, within the borders, it is as if a week has passed. It is hard to think that only a year ago, Syria had one of the most stable regimes in the Middle East. Its president Bashar al-Assad seemed to enjoy a consensus that the other Middle Eastern dictators, starting from Hosni Mubarak, did not have. The economic difficulties hadn’t yet reached the breaking point of tolerance as they had in Egypt. And lastly, the geopolitical position of Syria put several obstacles in front of a possible revolt. For years the Syrian regime had been the only certainty in an area that is dense with ambiguity and problems: the chaos of Iraq following the American occupation, the fragility of Lebanon with its intermittent civil wars, Israel and the occupation of Palestine. No one wanted, and in many ways no one still wants, the sudden and violent fall of the Syrian regime, not even the Western powers, starting from the United States. It is impossible to think of a “calculated” regime change, it is impossible to predict what will happen if the Assad regime, which has lasted 40 years, should fall.

All of these certainties collapsed one after the other. No one expected that the Syrian revolution could have reached such proportions and developed in this way. From a year since the start of the revolts, which began in March 2011, Syria today appears to be on the brink of a civil war. The regime’s repression of the uprising in the most recent days has reached its apex. The prolonged shelling of the city of Homs, one of the strongholds of the “rebels”, is bringing about the death of hundreds. A few days earlier, there was the failure and the withdrawal of the Arab League’s observers, after having admitted their own incapacity to put a halt to the violence. Then, the lack of reaching an agreement on the UN resolution from the Arab League initiative that asked for Bashar to step down and to start the transition process towards democracy. A resolution that, though excluding a military intervention, was blocked in no uncertain terms by the double veto of Russia and China.

Never before as today are all eyes set on the armed aspect of the revolt, that Free Syrian Army (FSA) constituted prevalently of deserters of the armed forces that since July 2011 has militarily opposed the repression. The United States, though excluding a direct armed intervention, seems to think of supporting the FSA with arms and money, with the help of Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. On the other side, Russia and Iran continue to support the regime and supply Bashar al-Assad’s militia. In essence, there are all the elements for a sort of “proxy war” with dynamics that resemble those of Vietnam in the 1960s or, to stay in the region, similar to the style of the Lebanese civil wars.

The armed revolt and the regime’s propaganda – What is unfolding before our eyes can be defined as a sort of “self-fulfilling prophecy”. The regime has insisted since the beginning that the revolt was an armed on, directed by foreign elements, fruit of an international conspiracy and underscored by ethnic reasons: Sunnis against Alawites. Even when that was evidently not the case at all. In the regime’s version, the repression of the protesters has always been presented as a fight against invisible “terrorists” and against armed gangs that were not identified in any clear way. It had been Bashar al-Assad himself, in a speech held at the People’s Council at the end of last March, to set this narrative of events, deluding a good number of Syrians who hoped at least in a partial recognition of the growing dissent in the country and in the opening towards a pacific exit strategy that at the same time seemed still to be realistic. Today, some of the elements that constitute the regime’s propaganda have become reality: it is true that the armed revolt has assumed a certain importance. It is true that foreign intervention is ever more pressing, first under the form of economic and diplomatic pressure, and perhaps from now on even under the form of military aid. It is true that even the ethnic aspects of the clashes have become more evident. The Alawites, a minority group to which the al-Assad family belongs, are almost all on the side of the regime, as well as how the able propaganda of the regime has always tried to paint the revolt as directed towards the creation of an Islamic state in which the exponents of other religious groups would find themselves emarginated or worse, persecuted. Some of the lies of the regime have transformed themselves, at least in part, into truth.

The wind of the Arab Spring – But it has not always been that way. The Syrian revolt started spontaneously and it is still prevalently an authentic revolt, brought forward by the Syrian citizens without the help of anyone. The requests of the protesters are for the most part extraneous to a religious discourse: they are asking for freedom, democracy, social justice. And, despite everything, the peaceful protesters continue to build the true motor of the revolt. Everything had its start in Tunisia and Egypt. The Syrian revolt would probably never have taken place without the precedent Arab Springs. The domino effect in this case is striking. When the so-called Arab Spring began in North Africa, something in Syria had shaken. Small events, but taken all together make up a definite change in the environment. When I was in Damascus, in the winter of 2010, the transformation was evident. It was enough to look at the debates that were flooding the information sites in that period: there were discussions on the news of the uprisings against Mubarak and Ben Ali, and it is simple to pass from these arguments to the situation in Syria. One almost does not even notice it happening. In substance, the problems are and remain the same in all the Arab countries: corruption, growing gap between the rich and the poor, daily humiliation, lack of freedom, an economy that is on the decline in a way that is seemingly unstoppable. One talks of Egypt and Tunisia, and in reality, one is talking of Syria.

The phenomenon doesn’t concern only Internet. Even outside of the web, the atmosphere is visibly changing. The traditional remissive and apolitical nature that has always characterised the population seems to be crumbling. Acts of bullying and arrogance that were once tolerated by perseverance are now met with a growing impatience. In February the first marches were organised, in front of the Egyptian and Libyan embassies, to express solidarity with the Arab Spring. Then something that until only a few months before had been unthinkable: dozens of persons took to the streets of Damascus to protest against the violence of a policeman against the child of a shopkeeper. The protesters shouted, “the Syrian people will not be humiliated,” which successively became one of the most widespread slogans in the protests to follow. Damascus was thus the first city to move, something that today might seem incredible.

On 15 March, a group of youth gathered together at the suq (market) of Hamidiya: it was the first time that films that had been made using mobile phones had been put onto Internet. Al Jazeera, the pan-Arab network of Qatar, one of the Arab world’s most widespread channels, immediately began to transmit them, also allowing those who did not have an Internet connection to know what was going on. On 16 March, the relatives of some political prisoners gathered in front of the Ministry of the Interior. The security forces intervened with violence, beating the protesters and arresting dozens of them. Small groups of protesters continued to take to the streets, but this was still a limited phenomenon. Until that moment, the only ones to make a move had been the “civil society” of Damascus: a middle-to-upper class of intellectuals and youth who were working in the cultural field, in journalism, civil organisations and human rights groups.

participation spans all ages

The dynamics of the protests had changed in those very days. In the small city of Dera’a, in southern Syria, a group of children with spray paint wrote some slogans against the regime on a wall. The emulation of the Egyptian revolt was quite clear: the writing was imitating the anti-Mubarak slogans used by the young Egyptians of the 25 January movement. The children copied them directly from the reports on Al Jazeera. The reaction of the regime was immediate: the children were arrested. The next day their parents and the families of the children took to the streets to protest, encouraged by that same atmosphere that had materialised a few days earlier in Damascus. The security forces intervened, shooting: there were the first deaths. The funerals became the occasion for even larger protests, and the repression was growing more and more ferocious. The nearby villages ran in support of Dera’a. The protesters numbered in the thousands. The Syrian revolt had begun.

The evolution of the revolt – From Damascus, the uprising moved to the provinces, and from the elite, it was substituted by the lower-middle class. This takes into consideration very often those same sectors of the population which initially constituted the pillars of the support to the regime: farmers, labourers, office workers and shopkeepers who in the last fifteen years had been abandoned and penalised by the liberalisation reforms. They were the ones who most strongly felt the effects of growing corruption in the circles of power that gravitated around the regime and of the progressive cuts in state aid. Other cities and regions progressively joined the protests: Banyas, Nawa, Homs, Latakia, Idlib, Qamishli, Hama and many others. At the start, the protests were born from various, localised needs: each region has its own requests and its own complaints regarding the regime. Especially, at the start, it was not asked for Bashar al-Assad to step down: the slogans demanded the end of corruption, reforms, more freedom.

It’s been the ferocious repression of the regime to give unity to this fragmented chain of uprisings. And, it is the repression of the regime to radicalise the requests of the protesters. As they gradually saw their death toll rise in the dozens, and then in the hundreds of protesters, the legitimacy of the president had progressively crumbled, and the marches became an open revolt against Bashar al-Assad and his regime. It has been a peaceful uprising: no one at the start thought of using arms against the army and the security forces. The control of the military by the regime is total, almost all of the officers are Alawites and their loyalty is absolute.